Amazon S3 bucket could be utilized as a very simple alternative to full-fledged Maven repository managers like Nexus or Artifactory. It is useful for publishing internal plugins or temporary patches waiting for official merge. The following has been tested with Grails 2.3.8, your mileage may vary.

As Grails adoption grows within an organization, it is likely that over time different projects will end up running on different Grails versions. Consequently, developers will need to ensure they have corresponding runtime enabled within their environment. That is exactly what GVM Tool is meant to do. Unfortunately for many corporate users there is a little pesky obstacle to its use: Windows.

Following Paul’s presentation on the subject at New York Groovy/Grails Meetup we have made our Grails-based event-driven SOA proof-of-concept available in GitHub.

Since the project’s page provides enough details about the components, I don’t want to re-iterate the same. Instead, I would like to outline a little bit of background and history behind the prototype, because it illustrates one important sharp turn in the evolution.

Ever since the Play framework came onto the scene, I’ve been sold on the idea of containerless deployment. The old model of a bunch of apps deployed in a single container sharing resources and Java EE components just never really materialized. Thanks to the thriving Grails plugin community, we have the Standalone App Runner plugin that makes containerless deployment dead simple for Grails apps. But what would you be giving up in terms of performance if you move away from a commercial enterprise-y app server like WebLogic in favor of embedded Tomcat or Jetty? As it turns out, absolutely nothing.

There are quite a few modern web frameworks out there vying for attention. In the startup scene, where CTOs have carte blanche, frameworks like Rails (Ruby), Django (Python), and CodeIgniter (PHP) seem to get the most attention. All of these frameworks are highly productive in a green field environment. In an enterprise setting however, Grails has some compelling advantages over these frameworks, making it a natural choice for any enterprise IT shop seeking the extreme productivity that modern web frameworks offer, and that startups take for granted.